Kitchen Fairy
by Queen Annie-Ferny's Calling
Summary: In which Mandy reflects. Because, yes, it's so totally her fault that Lady's dead. Oneshot.


**I was up 'til two last night rereading Ella Enchanted. Though I had always liked it before, it wasn't until I randomly plucked it from my bookshelf yesterday and went through it again that I was really filled with appreciation for the storyline; definitely one of my favourites now. –nod-**

**Naturally, I was curious to check out its fandom, and, when I did, I was a little disappointed. I'm still going through various fics, but I didn't see much that excited me. Mostly overused AU/post-book plots, really. So I wrote this, a quick drabble-oneshot and my first _EE_ fic. Enjoy.**

**

* * *

**

**[Kitchen Fairy]**

Mandy stood in the kitchen, surrounded by a pearly cloud of steam that rose from the pot in her hands before proceeding to swirl teasingly around her head. She barely noticed. Weak rays of sunlight streamed in through the open window, reflecting merrily off the various pots and pans that hung from the walls, and songbirds chittered happily from their perches in the trees outside. Yet the glimmer of light and sound did not fit the mood, could not possibly match up with the black cloud of despair that seemed to hang over the house like a forbidding storm just waiting to break.

For Mandy, it already had.

The turmoil was inside of her. The monstrous truth of failing clutched at her stomach, threatening to turn it inside out at any moment. Hard grey rain pattered miserably down in all corners of her mind, pulling any good thoughts away with them. The manor now felt strangely empty, huge and unknown, as if all the life had been sucked out of it, and the fairy could not help but blame herself as the cause of this new feeling of absence.

_Fairy!_ Bah; the word was meaningless, stripped of its initial awe and beauty and grace. Being a fairy, even a kitchen fairy who used naught but small magic in the most desperate of times, felt a useless role now, since, apparently, "small magic" and simple spells enforced no impact whatsoever on the dreadful course that life always wanted to take.

A cool breeze blew into the room from outdoors, startling Mandy out of her trance-like state. Making her legs move again, she bustled around the cooking space once more, shaking her head to clear the desolate thoughts; fairy or no fairy, she shouldn't be behaving like that. Still, as quickly as they were drained, the images returned, as if determined to root themselves into place in her mind for forever: Lady Eleanor as a carefree girl, running barefooted through the vegetable garden; fast-forward a few years, now, to see her courting a handsome young man, talking in carefully muted tones behind a clump of rose bushes; her lying sick in bed with her daughter, Ella, laughing along with the lass despite the cough that racked her throat.

Taking a deep breath, Mandy closed her eyes and shoved the barren pictures to the back of her mind where she would be sure to look back at them sometime in the near future; it was no use to ponder upon memories of the past, for they would never change, and at the moment she must focus on preparing dinner. She turned her gaze back to the cauldron of broth that served as both the task at hand and an acceptable distraction; the cream of mushroom soup was thick and pale as she puréed it slowly, the washed-out colours blending together to form a continuous flow of beige liquid. It wasn't entirely one hue, however; flecks of black peppered the soup as Mandy stirred, painfully reminding her that you could never truly trust something—especially if fate was your rival.

By all the stars in the fairy world, she was doing it again! She mentally cursed herself for being so foolish as to continue to let her head dawdle off again, to carry on in forgetting that placing your faith in the wrong hands could mean everything.

"I should have checked," she breathed to herself, her voice barely a whisper. "Oh, if only I had realized she hadn't eaten those horrid unicorn hairs." But it was too late to dwell on the past, to late to wish she'd acted sooner, too late to doing anything.

Mandy the fairy godmother turned back to her soup.

* * *

**Eh, I know; nothing exciting. Just a lazy half-hour's work. –shrug- Chances are I'll add another chapter featuring another character to this, but _when_ exactly I can't promise. ;) Just wait and see.**

**Happy New Year! Wishing everyone a good sendoff to 2009,**

**--Annie;;/**

_**Thursday January 1, 2009** _

**Friday February 13, 2009 Edit: So I figure that this is_ so_ never getting updated. Heh. ;) Its status has hereby on been changed.**


End file.
